Thu, 02/04/2010 - 18:53
US Medical System: The Worst in 19 Industrialized Nations
Reuters reports on a study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, authored by Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee, published in Health Affairs, a peer-reviewed journal:
France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.
The study abstract:
We compared trends in deaths considered amenable to health care before age seventy-five between 1997 - 98 and 2002 - 03 in the United States and in eighteen other industrialized countries. Such deaths account, on average, for 23 percent of total mortality under age seventy-five among males and 32 percent among females. The decline in amenable mortality in all countries averaged 16 percent over this period. The United States was an outlier, with a decline of only 4 percent. If the United States could reduce amenable mortality to the average rate achieved in the three top-performing countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year by the end of the study period.
One hundred thousand deaths per year...every year.
